Where Science Went Wrong (hilarious web site)

On May 11, 2:36*am, Martin Brown
wrote:

Not necessarily. I know an amateur cactus grower held in such high
repute that for very rare new discoveries he is given some seed on the
very rational grounds that he is more likely to be able to propagate it
to flowering size more rapidly than the professionals at Kew.

I am not trying to give an absolute rule that says that all amateurs
must be incompetent. Merely that those whose works are published in
peer-reviewed journals, those who hold impressive academic posts...
are, at least in the field of their specialty, a better foundation to
trust in to build your own self-consistent edifice of knowledge...
than self-appointed "experts" who proclaim that there is a BIG
CONSPIRACY to hide the fact that dinosaurs walked the Earth along with
men, that flying saucers are visiting us each day, and so on and so
forth.

Do you truly feel that I am giving unsound advice in so recommending?

I know I have no hesitation in choosing Newton, Einstein, and Darwin
over Gerard Kelleher, Brad Guth, and Ed Conrad.

Of course, having passed first-year calculus and the like makes it
possible for me to see that, no, I have not been brainwashed, but have
in my hands truth I can understand, verify, and work with. If
scientific orthodoxy were nothing more than faith in the most
impressive and conventional authorities, there would be nothing to
choose between the orthodox and the rebels.

It is precisely the ability to confirm science by experiment that
distinguishes truth from dogma, the expert from the charlatan, and
progress from ignorance.

John Savard

Quadibloc wrote:
On May 11, 2:36 am, Martin Brown
wrote:

Not necessarily. I know an amateur cactus grower held in such high
repute that for very rare new discoveries he is given some seed on the
very rational grounds that he is more likely to be able to propagate it
to flowering size more rapidly than the professionals at Kew.

I am not trying to give an absolute rule that says that all amateurs
must be incompetent. Merely that those whose works are published in

I am fighting against the common misconception that amateurs are
necessarily incompetant. An idea that you seemed to be espousing.

Your "qualified" electrical engineer may have scraped a pass in an exam
a couple of decades ago but I can think of some that I would not let
anywhere near my own fuse box. I once had to administer hot sweet tea to
an ashen grey electrocuted US service engineer who forgot that UK mains
was 240v and tested for live with moist fingers! Another plunged the
entire site into darkness by dropping a spanner into the wrong place!

peer-reviewed journals, those who hold impressive academic posts...
are, at least in the field of their specialty, a better foundation to
trust in to build your own self-consistent edifice of knowledge...

You are sailing dangerously close to an appeal to authority here.

You can have brilliant individuals with the highest academic credentials
who cannot teach students to save their lives. And they do have the
unfortunate effect of sounding exactly like the handwaving loons since
no one at their lectures can follow their reasoning. Relativity teaching
in electronics engineering courses often seems to follow this model.

I do agree in principle at least that it is better to listen to someone
of the stature of Prof Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Chair of
the Royal Society who is an excellent communicator of modern science
than any of the nutters and netkooks listed below.

than self-appointed "experts" who proclaim that there is a BIG
CONSPIRACY to hide the fact that dinosaurs walked the Earth along with
men, that flying saucers are visiting us each day, and so on and so
forth.

Do you truly feel that I am giving unsound advice in so recommending?

I know I have no hesitation in choosing Newton, Einstein, and Darwin
over Gerard Kelleher, Brad Guth, and Ed Conrad.

Of course not. The last 3 netloons are all in my kill file although
EdConman keeps morphing to evade it. Oriel36 only got through yesterday
because I was testing an unfiltered newserver - his babble is
predictable and easily simulated by a Shannon entropy based algorithm.

But you are on shakier ground with the electronics engineer Ivor Catt
(MA Cantab) who had some very strange ideas about electricity and
relativity and ranted about them incessantly in the pages of the UK
electronics magazine Wireless World (aided and abetted by the then
editor who also had a bee in his bonnet about relativity).
Wiki has a bit on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Catt

Some of his ideas on wafer scale integration were excellent.

Of course, having passed first-year calculus and the like makes it
possible for me to see that, no, I have not been brainwashed, but have
in my hands truth I can understand, verify, and work with. If
scientific orthodoxy were nothing more than faith in the most
impressive and conventional authorities, there would be nothing to
choose between the orthodox and the rebels.

You have to keep that distinction clear. And it gets more than a bit
hazy in areas of bleeding edge research in string theory and cosmology.

It is precisely the ability to confirm science by experiment that
distinguishes truth from dogma, the expert from the charlatan, and
progress from ignorance.

I don't approve of the way you want to claim truth vs dogma. Formal
proof of correctness is only possible in mathematics not in science.

Science by its very nature gives us a working description that matches
reality - it might or might not be correct, but as yet noone has found
an experiment that falsifies it. The opposite of ignorance is knowledge.

Regards,
Martin Brown

On May 11, 7:10*am, Martin Brown
wrote:
Quadibloc wrote:

It is precisely the ability to confirm science by experiment that
distinguishes truth from dogma, the expert from the charlatan, and
progress from ignorance.

I don't approve of the way you want to claim truth vs dogma. Formal
proof of correctness is only possible in mathematics not in science.

Science by its very nature gives us a working description that matches
reality - it might or might not be correct, but as yet noone has found
an experiment that falsifies it. The opposite of ignorance is knowledge.

That was another issue that I didn't want to touch on due to lack of
space. Yes, Einstein showed us that Newton didn't give us absolute
Truth, and so it may well turn out that Einstein didn't give us
absolute Truth either... if you don't count quantum mechanics as
having *already* proven that.

And it's in the very early days for string theory. Bringing in the
strong and weak nuclear forces seems to have solved the
renormalization problems of Kaluza-Klein, but, yes, we're still a ways
off from knowing if it's more than pretty mathematics.

My point is not to say that authority makes truth. But that if you
don't know the science yourself, it's just common sense to prefer
authorities who appear to be widely respected - at least if that
respect appears to have been obtained honestly, that is, without
coercion - to the "nutters".

The trouble is that people like Velikovsky and von Daniken can spin
pretty impressive and convincing arguments to a naive layperson. To a
person otherwise helpless against them, while authority may be a weak
reed, it is better than having no defense at all.

John Savard

On Mon, 10 May 2010 10:10:48 -0700 (PDT), trag
wrote in

in sci.astro.amateur,rec.arts.sf.written:

On May 6, 10:59 pm, "Brian M. Scott" wrote:

On Thu, 6 May 2010 08:41:43 -0700 (PDT), trag
wrote in

in sci.astro.amateur,rec.arts.sf.written:

[...]

My experience is that while (some) scientists may have a
rational way of thinking within their specialty, most of
them do not apply that skill outside their specialty.
At the very least, this is true of most of the engineers
I've worked with.

Engineer != scientist.

While partly true, your equation is irrelevant to the
conversation at hand.

It manifestly isn't an equation, and it is not irrelevant to
the statement to which it was a response: you cannot
legitimately use engineers as evidence to support a
statement about scientists.

[...]

: Martin Brown
: Your "qualified" electrical engineer may have scraped a pass in an
: exam a couple of decades ago but I can think of some that I would not
: let anywhere near my own fuse box. I once had to administer hot sweet
: tea to an ashen grey electrocuted US service engineer who forgot that
: UK mains was 240v and tested for live with moist fingers! Another
: plunged the entire site into darkness by dropping a spanner into the
: wrong place!

Clearly, warning lights are flashing down in quality control.

However, I'm more wondering whether there's some conflation betrween
"electrical engineer" and "electrician" going on here. Sort of like
the difference between opthamalogist and optician, except more with
electrons than photons. But... maybe not.

Wayne Throop http://sheol.org/throopw

Robert Sneddon wrote:

In John D. Clark's "Ignition!" he mentions that at one point in the
late 1950s a group of Russian rocket engineers published details in the
open scientific press of a rocket fuel/oxidiser combo which was superior
to the state of the art known to the US defence field. The Russians were
apparently under the impression the information they had made public was
actually widely known. It caused some head-scratching in the US, in part
because the thinking went that if the Russians thought this advanced
rocket fuel/oxidiser combination was common knowledge, just how advanced
was their secret stuff?

We did the same thing in reverse - Adm Rickover openly published much
information on our [Naval] nuclear power program, until he toured the
[then] new Soviet icebreaker Lenin. Seeing how far behind they were,
and much of what he thought of as obvious actually wasn't, he returned
home and promptly classified great swathes of basic technology and
engineering.

OTOH it was widely believed in the Fleet that we intentionally leaked
details of our SLBM fire and launch control systems (which had standby
and training modes in addition to the launch modes) in hope the
Soviets would adopt them and replace their systems which only had
'off' and 'launch' modes.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

My father worked on the Manhattan Project as a very junior scientist,
and he never believed all the paranoia and propaganda about "Soviet
atom spies," to the point he wasn't entirely sure there WERE any. He
said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, and certainly wasn't too much for the
Soviets to figure out. They weren't stupid.

(Yes, I know the Soviets really did steal the information, but when
Dad was talking about this forty-five years ago that wasn't yet
established beyond all reasonable doubt. American propaganda was
usually less blatantly false than what the other side produced, but it
still wasn't very trustworthy.)

Your father probably didn't realize what many people still don't
realize today - that even though the *science* of a bomb is fairly
straightforward, the *engineering* is anything but. The two are often
confused even though they are radically different things.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Wayne Throop wrote:
: Martin Brown
: Your "qualified" electrical engineer may have scraped a pass in an
: exam a couple of decades ago but I can think of some that I would not
: let anywhere near my own fuse box. I once had to administer hot sweet
: tea to an ashen grey electrocuted US service engineer who forgot that
: UK mains was 240v and tested for live with moist fingers! Another
: plunged the entire site into darkness by dropping a spanner into the
: wrong place!

Clearly, warning lights are flashing down in quality control.


Just another victim of industrial disease?

--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

On Tue, 11 May 2010 06:04:30 GMT, (David
Goldfarb) wrote:

In article ,
DougL wrote:
On May 6, 3:57*pm, (David Goldfarb) wrote:
it is definitely fan *fiction*, not just exploring arguments. And
well-written, entertaining fiction at that.

And having said that. Neither of you gives a link to the story!

If only there were some way of searching for web pages containing
key words or phrases, such as a story's title....

Okay, okay:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

Hilarious!

Chapter 4 was a hoot! Literal LOL and it takes a *lot* to do
that to me. I particularly liked "On the other hand, one competent
hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a
week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money,
or had a week free." I love the or-phrase just casually dropped in
there.

I also like the chapter titles.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Quadibloc wrote:
On May 11, 2:36 am, Martin Brown
wrote:

Not necessarily. I know an amateur cactus grower held in such high
repute that for very rare new discoveries he is given some seed on the
very rational grounds that he is more likely to be able to propagate it
to flowering size more rapidly than the professionals at Kew.

I am not trying to give an absolute rule that says that all amateurs
must be incompetent. Merely that those whose works are published in
peer-reviewed journals, those who hold impressive academic posts...
are, at least in the field of their specialty, a better foundation to
trust in to build your own self-consistent edifice of knowledge...
than self-appointed "experts" who proclaim that there is a BIG
CONSPIRACY to hide the fact that dinosaurs walked the Earth along with
men, that flying saucers are visiting us each day, and so on and so
forth.

Do you truly feel that I am giving unsound advice in so recommending?

I know I have no hesitation in choosing Newton, Einstein, and Darwin
over Gerard Kelleher, Brad Guth, and Ed Conrad.

Of course, having passed first-year calculus and the like makes it
possible for me to see that, no, I have not been brainwashed, but have
in my hands truth I can understand, verify, and work with. If
scientific orthodoxy were nothing more than faith in the most
impressive and conventional authorities, there would be nothing to
choose between the orthodox and the rebels.

It is precisely the ability to confirm science by experiment that
distinguishes truth from dogma, the expert from the charlatan, and
progress from ignorance.

How then are we constantly bombarded with "scientific" studies that
"prove" that butter, red wine, meat, eggs, bread, you-name-it, is bad
for you, good for you, bad for you, etc.? Or that the world is warming,
cooling, changing? Could it not be a question of "he who pays the piper"
and that qualified scientists are playing the tune requested in many
cases without reporting on the rest of the symphony?

I might trust the scientist, but I don't trust the person who is paying
him or her, and even university research is not above suspicion.

--

Rob Bannister